SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “The Anatomy of Melancholy.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (28 June 1998): 2.

In the following review, Eder offers a favorable assessment of The Rings of Saturn, which he views as a lament and an extension of The Emigrants, albeit less focused and potent.

At the end of his tormented pilgrim's regress through memory and the stripped flatlands of East Anglia, the narrator cites for one last time his ghostly companion throughout: the 17th century writer Sir Thomas Browne.

Mourning—in a very large sense, the heart of W. G. Sebald's fictional meditation—was traditionally observed by wearing black. Browne wrote of the old custom of draping in black silks the mirrors, portraits and landscapes hanging in the house of the deceased “so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a...